As he once more struck the village street, this familiar whirl of thoughts was buzzing in Delafield’s mind, pierced, however, by one sharper and newer. Julie! Did he know—had he ever dared to find out—how she regarded this future which was overtaking them? She had tried to sound him; she had never revealed herself.
In Lady Henry’s house he had often noticed in Julie that she had an imaginative tenderness for rank or great fortune. At first it had seemed to him a woman’s natural romanticism; then he explained it to himself as closely connected with her efforts to serve Warkworth.
But suppose he were made to feel that there, after all, lay her compensation? She had submitted to a loveless marriage and lost her lover; but the dukedom was to make amends. He knew well that it would be so with nine women out of ten. But the bare thought that it might be so with Julie maddened him. He then was to be for her, in the future, the mere symbol of the vulgarer pleasures and opportunities, while Warkworth held her heart?
Nay!
He stood still, strengthening in himself the glad and sufficient answer. She had refused him twice—knowing all his circumstances. At this moment he adored her doubly for those old rebuffs.
Within twenty-four hours Delafield had received a telegram from his friend at Zanzibar. For the most part it recapitulated the news already sent to Cairo, and thence transmitted to the English papers. But it added the information that Warkworth had been buried in the neighborhood of a certain village on the caravan route to Mokembe, and that special pains had been taken to mark the spot. And the message concluded: Fine fellow. Hard luck. Everybody awfully sorry here.
These words brought Delafield a sudden look of passionate gratitude from Julie’s dark and sunken eyes. She rested her face against his sleeve and pressed his hand.
Lady Blanche also wept over the telegram, exclaiming that she had always believed in Henry Warkworth, and now, perhaps, those busybodies who at Simla had been pleased to concern themselves with her affairs and Aileen’s would see cause to be ashamed of themselves.
To Delafield’s discomfort, indeed, she poured out upon him a stream of confidences he would have gladly avoided. He had brought the telegram to her sitting-room. In the room adjoining it was Aileen, still, according to her mother’s account, very ill, and almost speechless. Under the shadow of such a tragedy it seemed to him amazing that a mother could find words in which to tell her daughter’s story to a comparative stranger. Lady Blanche appeared to him an ill-balanced and foolish woman; a prey, on the one hand, to various obscure jealousies and antagonisms, and on the other to a romantic and sentimental temper which, once roused, gloried in despising “the world,” by which she generally meant a very ordinary degree of prudence.
She was in chronic disagreement, it seemed, with her daughter’s guardians, and had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen’s fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own way with her own child. The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared shorn of all its attraction and romance in the smaller, more conventional, and meaner egotisms of Lady Blanche.
And yet, in her own way, she was full of heart. She lost her head over a love affair. She could deny Aileen nothing. That was what her casual Indian acquaintances meant by calling her “sweet.” When Warkworth’s attentions, pushed with an ardor which would have driven any prudent mother to an instant departure from India, had made a timid and charming child of eighteen the talk of Simla, Lady Blanche, excited and dishevelled—was it her personal untidiness which accounted for the other epithet of “quaint,” which had floated to the Duchess’s ear, and been by her reported to Julie?—refused to break her daughter’s heart. Warkworth, indeed, had begun long before by flattering the mother’s vanity and sense of possession, and she now threw herself hotly into his cause as against Aileen’s odious trustees.
They, of course, always believed the worst of everybody. As for her, all she wanted for the child was a good husband. Was it not better, in a world of fortune-hunters, that Aileen, with her half-million, should marry early? Of money, she had, one would think, enough. It was only the greed of certain persons which could possibly desire more. Birth? The young man was honorably born, good-looking, well mannered. What did you want more? She accepted a democratic age; and the obstacles thrown by Aileen’s guardians in the way of an immediate engagement between the young people appeared to her, so she declared, either vulgar or ridiculous.
Well, poor lady, she had suffered for her whims. First of all, her levity had perceived, with surprise and terror, the hold that passion was taking on the delicate and sensitive nature of Aileen. This young girl, so innocent and spotless in thought, so virginally sweet in manner, so guileless in action, developed a power of loving, an absorption of the whole being in the beloved, such as our modern world but rarely sees.
She lived, she breathed for Warkworth. Her health, always frail, suffered from their separation. She became a thin and
